Five ways we can make LibreOffice and Thunderbird work better together
LibreOffice doesn’t include an email program, but there are many excellent free and open source software clients that work well alongside it. One prominent example is Mozilla Thunderbird – a sister project to the Firefox web browser.
We know that many people use LibreOffice and Thunderbird as part of their daily workflows – so how can we make them work better together? We reached out on social media to hear from our users – on Mastodon and Twitter (and the Thunderbird project posted on their Mastodon and Twitter accounts too).
Thanks a lot to everyone who responded! There were many great ideas, and here are our top five:
Jay Robbie:
A consistent UI/UX would help familiarize newcomers to both tools more quickly…. possibly a unified Settings area if you were to combine the functionality of both apps. Include a Thunderbird app launcher in the LibreOffice dashboard.
Briani Davide:
Link documents to calendar events or tasks, enabling quick access to relevant files during meetings or when working on projects and create calendar events or tasks directly from within LibreOffice.
this.ven:
What about a better integration of the viewing, editing and exporting capabilities from LibreOffice into Thunderbird for files send via mail? For example, an ODT file can be viewed and edited directly in Thunderbird (without leaving the window) and exported as PDF file.
Johannes:
For me it would help if both would have the same shortcuts for styling the text. For example Ctrl+1 for Header1 etc.
Fabián Valverde:
Being able to insert from Thunderbird contacts into LibreOffice while writing, like when you type “@” on Twitter…
So, let’s make these improvements happen! LibreOffice and Thunderbird are community-driven open source projects, so the more help we get, the better. On our side, we have a meta bug tracking interoperability and integration, and this page shows how to get involved. If you want to help out in the Thunderbird project, see this page. (And if you’re a business running LibreOffice and Thunderbird, please consider funding developers to work on the features you need.)